Help! Aliens Have Taken Over my Contact Center Applications!

Have you ever seen the cult movie ‘Invasion of the Bodysnatchers’? The film’s heroes discover that humans are being taken over….one-by-one….by aliens. Their friends look exactly the same as before. Except now they behave very differently. And if you’re about to switch your contact center platform or solution, there’s an important parallel in here for you.

Unforseen Changes in Behaviour

Firstly, when we talk about changes in behavior in this blog, we don’t mean the people working around you changing … like someone suddenly deciding to travel to work by unicycle or supporting Tottenham Hotspur. People may act strangely for all sorts of reasons. It’s not for us to judge – or to suggest remedies, however tempting that might be.

The story starts when you’re looking forward to upgrading your contact center platform, moving to a new solution, merging two technology stacks or transitioning to the cloud. In theory, the migration shouldn’t harm your much-loved applications. But in reality, it can happen. And if it does …

Your Applications Will Never Be Quite the Same Again

Even if your new contact center platform is commissioned successfully, your applications may fail to migrate smoothly, though this isn’t obvious straight away. Going back to our movie-type analogy, it’s usually the pets that first notice something is wrong. It doesn’t smell right.

With your applications, your users will probably be first to sense something, then their managers, then everyone IT, and maybe the customer services team. If things are really grim, customers will start to notice too.

Changes in Functionality

Problems typically occur in critical application behavior and functionality – those important, sometimes hard-to-quantify nuances that fitted your organization so snugly before, protecting the customer experience you’d built up over years.

Suddenly, controls and features have either vanished completely, fail to work as expected, and even trigger a series of other problems. The trouble is, no-one can precisely recall how every detail worked previously, because proper documentation was never kept updated. And the people who knew how it all functioned may have left years ago. That means that restoring your application to how it should be is virtually impossible.

Migrations Can Have a Much Happier Ending

In the Bodysnatchers movie and all its clones, things usually end very badly. Civilization is destroyed. But it doesn’t have to be this way with your call center applications. You can prevent the ‘aliens’ from wrecking what you love – by relying on some friendly, trustworthy humans.

The guide explains how it’s possible to achieve a seamless migration involving any combination of application, vendor, and version – old and new. An independent, third-party provider like PSS can bypass tricky proprietary obstacles and make the process seem effortless.

Bodysnatcher Catchers

PSS can provide the vital specialist services and resources in key areas such as blueprinting your application with testing and documentation before you migrate. Then there are some smart tools and techniques for automated conversion, integration and testing.

As a result, you can avoid that ‘fingers-crossed’ approach when you first login to your application, post-migration. Everything will look, taste, feel, smell and behave like it should!